


With Steady Hand and Calm Heart

by Liitohauki



Series: Lost and Loved [6]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Gen, Jötunheimr | Jotunheim, Jötunn Loki, Nál is not a perfect mother, brief mention of harming a child, but she'll never be an abusive one, raised on Jötunheim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 22:45:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3706609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liitohauki/pseuds/Liitohauki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her child takes to witchery like a ridgecrow takes to crowing.</p><p>And like a ridgecrow, she is damningly annoying when she won’t stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Steady Hand and Calm Heart

**Author's Note:**

> In which Loki is as annoying as any five-year-old child, and Nál regrets her life decisions.
> 
> If you hover the cursor over the Finnish text, an English translation should pop up. All translations are also available in the end notes.

Her child takes to witchery like a ridgecrow takes to crowing.

And like a ridgecrow, she is damningly annoying when she _won’t stop_.

It seems like every waking moment, its “Amma look, look, I got it! Look! See? Are you looking, Amma? Are you?” and “teach me how to animate corpses Amma” and “but I didn’t _mean_ to set it on fire.”

Nál shows Loki how to knit wounds together, and finds her child nicking her own fingers with a knife so she can practice. She teaches her how to carve and build curses out of bone, and discovers a bone engraving promising her flatulence under her bed furs come low tide. She demonstrates how to charge a strand of hair with magic and use it as a core for spells, and Loki nearly picks her own head bare experimenting with the knowledge.

Mountain Yeller have mercy, if this is her punishment for the life she’s led then she is _sorry_. She is sorry and ready to reform her ways, renounce her life as a hermit and rejoin society to become a respected member of a community, if for no other reason than because towns with more than a hundred residents are obligated to have communal childwatch services.

_I should have left her at the temple._

She tries to curtail Loki’s enthusiasm the best she knows how: by working her to the bone. She has Loki fetch the water, sweep the rooms, help her gut and skin animals, wash the bone- and stonewear, _carve new_ bone- and stonewear, charge the wards, redraw worn sigils, fill the troughs, collect and grind velvet antler, brush the tamvargs…

If Loki weren’t yet so young, she’d have her herding the hallaporo and hunting with the vargs on her own to get her out from underfoot. As it is, she throws at her every menial task appropriate for a child her age, and a few that likely aren’t. But at the end of each tide, she still has enough life in her to ask:

“Teach me more, Amma.”

Nál tries to console herself with the thought that it could be worse: the whelp could lack all talent for magic, or else show no interest in her teachings.

Still, some tides she can’t but sit and think back to a time her child couldn’t leap about nor wag her tongue so with longing. She was little more than a squalling, defecating lump then, but she could be kept happy and occupied with simply a handful of colored rocks or a sufficiently large bone to gnaw on.

Now, Nál is lucky to have half a heartbeat to herself before Loki demands her attention. Even when she’s quiet, Nál can’t enjoy the lack of interruption for long: she has learned to grow suspicious of silence as of late, as it often means her child has thought to entertain herself elsewhere, doing things that are ill-advised and, frequently, dangerous.

Just last ebb tide, she had caught Loki leaning precariously over one of the hot springs, dangling a messily carved sigil stone on a string above the steaming pit to see if she could “boil magic”. Her heart still gave a faint lurch every time she so much as thought of the incident. Her child could have fallen in, or suffered heatstroke, or fallen in _and_ suffered heatstroke!

Nál had yanked her away with much too much force and scolded her so harshly ice had burst on her skin, then tossed her into the nearest snow bank to cool down. In hindsight, it was a very irrational action: she _knew_ Loki could survive high temperatures just as fine as any other jötun so long as she remained properly hydrated, but fear and anger had overwhelmed her reasoning.

Loki had huddled there, tears forming over her markings in thick lines of ice as she sobbed into her hands.

The sight of her child curled in the snow, crying… Nál is not afraid to admit that she has never felt so ashamed of herself, before or since. She had laid down next to her child, too aware of her own inadequacy as a mother to dare touch her, and whispered apologies and promises in every language she knew.

Loki had been only too quick to forgive, but the guilt lingered. Nál thought it a small blessing – there were times since, when either circumstance or her vexing little witch-child had conspired to fray her temper to the point of breaking, and all that had kept the flood of her anger in check was that steep wall of guilt built on the memory of Loki, hiding her face from her while huddling in the snow.

Nál was a cursecaster, a skinwalker and a corpsecaller. She slept with vargs, wore the pelts of monsters on her shoulders and took pride in the fear her visage struck in both children and adults alike. But she would damn herself twice over before she let her child live in fear of her.

“Amma?”

She starts, the ribbon of thought slipping from her grasp at the tentative tug of small fingers. Lost in recollections, her hands have grown still, the pestle in her grip halted in its grinding. Loki is staring up at her, curious to see what has frozen her mother. She puts the pestle down and turns.

“Niin, Loki?”

There’s a smudge of green on Loki’s cheek, a streak of dark red down her chin; she has been playing with her mother’s dyes again. Her fingers leave a yellow imprint on Nál’s kilt as she stops tugging and lets go, grinning wide enough to show all her teeth. Their sharp points are tipped with color, as though at some point Loki had attempted to clean herself with her mouth.

“I made something for you. Come see!”

Heedless of stains, Nál lets Loki grab her hand and guide her to their bed chamber. At the back of the vaguely oval cavern, there is a large indentation in the stone of the floor. It is filled with the down feathers of different birds, all carefully covered under the marbled pelt of a hylves – an indulgence of hers, a soft little nest for her to sink into after a trying tide.

Now there are sigils scrawled in a riot of color all about the walls around it, and even a few on the ceiling above. She does not care to guess how Loki managed to reach so high. Her lovely hylves pelt bares spots of blue and violet and green.

She takes several deep breaths, letting her irritation rise and crest on the inhale before allowing it to flow out. Her anger feels strangely muted, rushing from her as freely as an ebbing tide. Surprising, considering the value of that pelt. She should be furious.

“This one’s for calm and patience, and this one’s for peace, and this one’s for happiness, and this one’s…”

_Ah. That explains it._

Nál follows along, examining each drawing her little crow points to with great interest. She can see the shapes of Loki’s rime lines in the round curves and sharp angles of one, her own overlapping waves and arrows in another, both intermingled and entwined in several. The sigils are crude, their forms simple and childish, and yet… She recognizes the sense of a successful working: Loki’s intentions shine bright and true through every scribble and blotch.

She allows their power to lap away at her annoyance and tension, until all that remains is an exasperated sort of fondness. Leave it to her child to weave such an intricate net of interlocking sigils in the fourth of a tide. Nál could have _sworn_ she hasn’t spoken to Loki of spell harmonics or magical resonance in sufficient detail to teach her this.

Perhaps she should savor her role as teacher while she still can.

**Author's Note:**

> There's so little Finnish in this, it hardly seems worth translating. But three times makes it tradition, so:
> 
> "Niin, Loki?" = "Yes, Loki?"
> 
> "Hylves" is - you guessed it - made up. It's a portmanteau of "hylje" (seal) and "ilves" (lynx). Funnily enough, the actual animal I pictured when writing looks nothing like a lynx or a seal. More like a big, fat alligator with fur and whiskers.


End file.
